If you die, I'll die.' 'But is you live, I'll live.' - Bowman and Kestrel, Firesong

I am as I am. The world is as it is. Whether I am content with that has very little to do with it.

The English seem to think drinking wine is like committing adultery, something you do rarely and abroad.

I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time- waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God- it changes me.

Self-sufficiency is the enemy of salvation. If you are self-sufficient, you have no need of God. If you have no need of God, you do not seek Him. If you do not seek Him, you will not find Him.

God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.

Madly, futilely, I wrote novel after novel, eight in all, that failed to find a publisher. I persisted because for me the novel was the supreme literary form: not just one among many, not a relic of the past, but the way we communicate to one another the subtlest truths about this business of living.